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Updated: June 1, 2025
The Wasp continues to oscillate behind the Mantis, in order to avoid the formidable grappling-engine; then, suddenly, when she judges that the other is baffled by the rapidity of her manoeuvres, she hurls herself upon the insect's back, seizes its neck with her mandibles, winds her legs round its thorax and hastily delivers a first thrust of the sting, to the front, at the root of the lethal legs.
In all the pines, a very thin membrane, in appearance much like an insect's wing, grows over and around the seed, and independent of it, while the latter is being developed within its base. Indeed this is often perfectly developed, though the seed is abortive; nature being, you would say, more sure to provide the means of transporting the seed, than to provide the seed to be transported.
A bee alights upon the flower the object of its visit being, of course, the sweets located in the five horn-shaped nectaries. In order to reach this nectar the insect must hang to the bulky blossom. Instantly, and almost of necessity, it would seem, one or more of the feet are seen to enter the upper opening of the fissure, and during the insect's movements are drawn through to the base.
He is as the bee which does not make its final burglarious headlong plunge into the calyx until after a protracted course of circuitous buzzing and much prefatory waste of time: and this with all the insect's credit for industry. So over-perverse a traveller, so ultra-dilatory a bee as the author of Modern Painters, must shorten his journey, must leave much honey unfilched.
It is as though the laying-implement could not persuade itself to die before accomplishing its mission. The insect's supreme aim is the egg; and, so long as the least spark of life remains, it makes dying efforts to lay. Leucopsis gigas exploits the nests of the Mason-bee of the Pebbles and the Mason-bee of the Sheds with equal zest.
"The difficult air of the iced mountain top, Where the birds dare not build, nor insect's wing Flit o'er the herbless granite." The transport of the artillery and ammunition was the most difficult point; and to this, accordingly, the Chief Consul gave his personal superintendence.
There were few trees, yet it was our insect's fate to drop directly above what trees there were, so that presently he came ker-plunk into a mass of tangled branches and stuck there, with his legs dangling helplessly between two limbs and his wings caught in the foliage at either side. Below was a group of Arab children, who at first started to run away.
"I don't like to see the poor thing struggle on a pin; if it must be killed, let us put it out of pain at once with a drop of camphor," said Mrs. Jo, getting out the bottle. "I know how to do it Mr. Hyde always killed 'em that way but I didn't have any camphor, so I use a pin," and Dan gently poured a drop on the insect's head, when the pale green wings fluttered an instant, and then grew still.
What happens in the insect's stomach to make the adult seek passionately what the youngster refused lest it should die? This is not a question of organic debility unable to endure a too substantial, too hard, too highly spiced dish.
Then what value has this dissection as an argument in favour of the insect's reasoning-powers when the wind blows? It has no value at all, for it would take place just the same in absolutely calm weather. Erasmus Darwin jumped too quickly to his conclusion, which was the outcome of his mental bias and not of the logic of things.
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